4 Disturbing Sleep Conditions No One Talks About

Everyone's heard of sleep walking, sleep talking and sleep paralysis. There are dozens of weird, sometimes creepy sleep disorders that affect a number of people and make their bedtime seem like a night at the circus, if the circus were less full of elephants and more full of people in pajamas dry humping the fridge. Which is kind of like a French-Canadian circus. Make sure you buy the poutine if you go, but watch how the carny hands it to you -- the last thing you need is his thumb bacteria in your gravy.

Hilarious sites like Cracked tend to only inform you of actually interesting and bizarre sleep disorders. What the hell is the deal with the stuff that everyone does but no one ever wants to talk about because it's ridiculous? Why does stuff keep oozing out of us at night, is what I'm asking. Why?

#4. Scalp Leakage

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I'll preface this by saying that I once heard a stand-up comedian make a joke about your head leaking maple syrup at night, and it opened my mind to a whole new reality. I wasn't the only one. And really it would have been a shame if I was, because that would mean that either I had some kind of super rare skull leprosy or my brain was trying to summon one of the Outer Gods and the portal was only opening wide enough for Shub-Niggurath to ooze one or two tentacles through.

The longer you own a pillow, the more like a turn of the century East Asian crime scene it will become. Every time you change your pillow case, you're pulling out a fluffy, comfy cloud that looks like it's been yanked straight from the asshole of Zeus himself after a rough night of low quality mead and Olestra burritos. It's yellowed and faded and terrifying, with wet filth patterns on it that seem to indicate that your hair spends all night releasing low volumes of oily piss to pass the time.

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You can feel your back door puckering in anticipation.

Logic dictates that you're probably just releasing head pee as a sort of relaxational process your body likes to go through as you wind down at night, because your body is a wonderland of gross when you're not paying attention to it. That's the scientific explanation for farts, incidentally -- your body attempting to be funny. Usually it works. Farts are hilarious. Or maybe it's just because your hair is naturally a bit greasy and if you hold something against it for eight hours a day, every day, it's going to get greasy, too. Feel free to test this theory by taping a swatch of cotton to Ron Jeremy's back for part of the day and see what it looks like when you're done. Just revolting.

If you Google "yellow stains on my pillow" right now, you'll get thousands of results from poor, confused, greasy Yahoo users desperate to understand why their hair follicles insist on jacking it all over their pillows at night with only the educated guesses of other Yahoo users to satiate their curiosity. Unfortunately, the people who provide info on Yahoo Answers generally only have Ph.D.s in meth production and dumbassery, so their answers are about as satisfying as mine, but with more typos and a general air of discontent over their inability to understand the metric system and how you can tell if a door is a push or a pull without a sign. As near as I can tell, no actual scientific body has bothered to write about this phenomenon, because no one important actually cares. It's really disturbing to the good people of eHow, however.

#3. Drool Crust

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As part of my ongoing plan to make total strangers never want to meet me in person, I have to let you know about my terrible crusty problem. Nine mornings out of 10, I wake up with a mysterious, flaky snail trail snaking out of the left corner of my mouth that for all the world looks like tiny goblins had been mining and then dragging leaking sacks of condensed milk out of my face all night long.

Now I'm not so ignorant as to not understand the mechanics of drooling -- you fall asleep, your jaw goes slack, you drool. Babies perfected it, seniors and drunks revel in it, you and I dabble from time to time, and it's wonderful. What I can't quite wrap my head around is how, every night, I brush my teeth to a glossy sheen with minty, delightful toothpaste, and I even give ol' Mr. Tongue a swipe to ensure maximum freshness, then I wake up in the morning and it tastes like I've been sucking on a wild animal's taint after coating it in crab apple juice. And there's a flaked trail of shame leading from my face to my yellowed pillow, an accusing finger pointing to my nocturnal lack of sanitation and good graces.

Basically, it's the mechanics of what happens to your mouth at night that confuses me. Science tells me that the basic cause is dryness. Your saliva production slows down at night, which allows bacteria the chance to proliferate and your saliva to thicken up a bit. During the day, bacteria is happy to live on carbs in your mouth, but at night, when you hopefully stop eating, they have to switch to protein, like the cells of your mucous membranes, and they apparently digest those about as well as you'd think, which means they're dropping a lot of sulfur bombs along the way. In layman's terms (more layman than that ridiculous shit I just said), your dried out, hungry mouth bacteria just shits up a storm in your mouth all night.

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Put that wretched stink flipper back in your noxious food depository.

But come on. There's thick, bacteria-laden saliva, and then there's diluted ass fudge, which is what we're all waking up with. It happens to everyone, and odds are it's why I wake up alone more often than not (one of the reasons, anyway), but it'd be nice if Johnson & Johnson put together some kind of anti-gruel tablets you could pop into your mouth at night that allow you to wake up with a mouthful of rosy cheer and a taste that is distinctly not the same as what I imagine a hobo's cleavage might taste like. Things are literally shitting in our mouths all night, why is no one working on a solution to this?